RoboEarth could allow robots to learn from their mistakes

Top European scientist have started to work on a project called “RoboEarth” that could potentially be used to allow robots to share information between each other.

RoboEarth will be the place where the robots can upload data from tasks that they have been programmed to undertake and they can also use the same system to ask for help in carrying out new tasks, thus they are able to learn for themselves (Skynet anyone?).

The system is like the equivalent of the World Wide Web but for robots, it will be used primarily as a communication system and as a database. The database will contain maps of places that the robots work, descriptions of any objects that they encounter and specific instructions that they used to complete the tasks.

RoboEarth researcher Dr Markus Waibel compared this to the human equivalent of Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is something that humans use to share knowledge, that everyone can edit, contribute knowledge to and access, he said. Something like that does not exist for robots.

If the system takes off it could allow a robot to gain a better understanding of what it means to do some of the more basic tasks that we take for granted, i.e. setting the dinner table and what items are needed to achieve this (knives, forks etc).

This way robots could become truly beneficial to humans as they progressively learn from each other to avoid making the same mistakes.

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WhatGoesUp

That’s really cool…but also really scary at the same time. Hope the robotic WWW is more secure than our own…wouldn’t want someone all these robots!…and then there is always Skynet…hopefully they can’t watch movies ;)